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Something I'll always remember was a discussion I had in English class in my last year of primary school with the teacher. There was some news article of some kid apparently attempting to blow himself up not too long after 9/11. The kid was caught and was then investigated for psychiatric conditions. I argued that it was a typical case of eurocentricism. "As long as you find yourself in the ideals of the other side, you must be insane right?", my teacher countered that that was not the point, the point was that the kid was going to blow himself up and if you don't value your own life you are insane because your life always has to come first. I argued back that if that were true all those brave American soldiers who were awarded medals for risking, and sometimes giving their lives for their country would also be investigated for insanity. But no, they get medals in pompous ceremonies, sometimes awarded to their widows for actually giving their lives. The teacher didn't really have a response and conceded that which side you were on probably had something to do with it. And I agreed and also noted that the other side probably does the same thing and considers you insane if you give your life for "freedom and democracy".
What is "insanity" though? does anyone have a working operative definition of this? You could say that behaviour contrary to your own survival is insanity, but as said before then everyone joining the military is clearly insane. Or people who make money with extreme sports. If we look back in history to how "insanity" has been used it doesn't paint a pretty picture of the term either. Homosexuals were insane, black slaves who had "the irrational desire for freedom" (dropatomania, look it up, it was actually used). Atheists, suffragettes, you name it. Ironically, the people who by today's conception were actually insane were not insane back then but merely possessed by daemons. (That, or messianic figures of nowadays huge religions but I degress)
I mean, what kind of brilliant scientific breakthrough let to homosexuality no longer being considered a mental illness? None actually, it just became culturally accepted, you can't have culturally accepted things be mental illnesses. That would be ... insulting? And that's more or less the point isn't it. "Mental illness" is basically just a giant insult. When people say "You should get mental treatment." they never mean it out of genuine concern for you, they just mean it as an insult. They also almost never say it about people whom they like or aren't at the very least angry at at the moment. "mentally insane" is simply put an insult. This is completely different from corporal illnesses. If someone says "Wow dude, you've been caughing for a week now, shouldn't you go see a doctor?", they say it out of genuine concern, not to insult you, not to devalue you. Medical conditions like myopia or diabetes aren't a stigma. Society doesn't disapprove really of people who wear glasses, but society does approve of people who have mental illnesses. It seems to me that the one necessary condition to call something a "mental illness" is "society does not approve".
Corporal illnesses are inharently disabilities. Having myopia is a disability, and this is not an insult really except maybe in cases like obesity because we think it isn't pretty. But ultimately human beings intuitively perceive themselves and others as some sort of ghost in a machine. What you truly are is the ghost, the machine, your body, is simply a vessel. Saying there is something wrong with the machine is like saying your car is broke, but attacking the ghost, now that's far more personal. It actually devalues someone as a human being. Mental illnesses are often not disabilities at all. They sometimes are, and they sometimes aren't, and sometimes they're a bit of both. Some vague personality disorders like "schizoid personality disorder" don't really present any disabilities. But society doesn't approve of people who don't go out and isolate themselves from the world in a hermit-like lifestyle. Then there's narcissistic personality disorder. But the funny part is that many very succesful people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and many political leaders display textbook symptoms, they're smart, they know it. And they want to have it their way and they demand excellence and special treatment from those around it and seemingly think they're the centre of the world. Yet, it doesn't impede them from achieving success, one might argue quite the opposite. Being a bit full of yourself in the end helps you get what you want in the world of business and politics.
Zienz
Science is inharently not moral, it doesn't judge if it's good or evil that lions eat zebras. Why? Because it good or evil can't be proven scientifically. Science is concerned with describing what happens and most importantly finding an explanation, a pattern, in how it happens. Leaving the morality and current cultural credos of society outside of it. Especially the explanation and patterns are interesting, describing what happens per se isn't that interesting. We all know rocks fall, but what kind of mathematical rules govern how rocks fall, that's the interesting part. In order for such an explanation to be considered a scientific theory in popper's theory, the notion of falsifiability was essential. You need to know if the explanation is wrong.
Coming up with a plausible explanation to some observed fact is easy. But for the explanation to be a scientific theory, it has to be so general that it is capable of forecasting events that have not yet been observed and when they are observed it should follow the forecast. Newton's laws of gravity and physics were able to forecast the existence of planets which were not yet observed by calculating their position from the path other planets took. And when you point a telescope in that area they were there. The occurence of that is very strong evidence to high accuracy, not correctness but accuracy of the theory. That something like that happens repeatedly by chance is very unlikely.
This brings us into the interesting realm of "soft science". Soft science lacks this altogether for the most part barring some exceptions. Okay, that's nice, but why still call it science then? In fact, why still call it useful? The entire point of science is that if a scientific theory has been affirmed repeatedly by correctly forecasting yet unobserved events then that it is capable of forecasting such things with high accuracy. Therefore, it is useful both practically and theoretically. Physical and chemical science is useful, we can build rockets or cars based on those theories. If we just randomly build rockets without first calculating the physics then stuff would explode quite a lot more often.
Soft science essentially isn't accurate and therefore using it practically is basically at your own risk. It's generating knowledge which may, or may not, be accurate. You can run a company based on some sociological theory but in 8 years it turns out the theory was false and your marketing campaign has been ineffective. In fact, that's something that's happened quite often. People build machines, and cars and buildings using knowledge derived with hard science which is accurate and therefore useful.
I've been using the term accurate in lieu of correct quite often and that has its reasons. "correct" is a term I'd not dare to use, it implies ultimate perfect accuracy. No room for improvement possible. A common misconception about hard science is that say Newton's theories of forces and gravity were proven wrong and superceded by special relativity which was superceded by the standard model. No, not really. Special relativity affirmed Newtonian mechanics, it merely made it slightly more accurate but it showed that Newton's mechanics are highly accurate provided you don't go above a quarter of the speed of light. Something people in Newton's time didn't really do. Relativistic mechanics are almost identical to Newtonian mechanics at low speeds, they are just slightly more accurate. The same applies for the standard model with respect to relativistic mechanics. In hard science, newer theories do not disprove old theories. They say the same general thing, except they become more and more accurate. Newton's mechanics are sitll accurate enough to be useful for the vast majority of tasks you might use them for.
This is the difference with soft science, soft science doesn't become more accurate. The new mainstream concensus often goes 180 degrees from the old one and it's typically motivated by politics and cultural perception. It is very moral often. You can often find two groups of researchers arriving at downright completely oppoosite conclusions about the same subject and both used 'accepted methodology'.
The medical dichotomy
Now, herein comes the problem. Corporal medicine is a hard science, psychiatry (not pharmaceutics) is a soft science. If we look at the history of psychiatry, unlike corporal medicine, it didn't become more accurate over time at all, it zig zagged all the way. First autism was caused by parents (and only by white parents???), then it was congenital, and now they say it might have a nurture factor after all.
How does one even establish that autism is congenital or not? Can you diagnose a newborn infant with autism? No, you can't. Haemophilia is congenital and you can easily show this because you can diagnose newborn infants with haemophilia. Cancer is not congenital and you can show this because you can check newborn infants for cancer.
I think we all heard the phrase 'correlation does not imply causation' (but it does correlate with it hurr durr). If only because correlation is a symmetric relationship, if X correlates with Y, then Y correlates with X. And causation is not symmetric. If X causes Y, Y needn't cause X. So even if you establish a correlation you have no way of knowing in which way the causation flows, if in any way. THere might also be a third unseen factor which causes both.
In order to establish a causative relationship you need a controlled experiment. A case where you keep everything the same except one controlled variable, if the variable you test alters as a result of the controlled variable thne you've eestablished a causative relationship. You remove any other factors but that one variable that might have an effect.
Okay, so here's the problem, psychiatry deals with the mental health of human beings. It is completely and utterly unethical to run a controlled experiment on the mental health of human beings. They do this in medical science by first testing it on animals, medical science is concerned with tissues which exist in much the same form in animals. If every animal on the planet dies if you expose it to radiation then it's not a far stretch that this applies to humans as well. But the "mind" with which psychiatry deals, it unique to human beings. The sapient conscious mind. It's unethetical to experiment on humans this way.
Do video games cause violence or not? Say there's a correlation, you can't know if they do? Maybe people who are naturally inclined towards violence play violent video games, maybe it's even catarthic and stops them from being violent or makes them less violent? You don't know. Would be great if we could run a controlled experiment, but we can't. You can't expose small children to violent video games to see if it makes them more violent than the control group because that's unethical. And this is exactly why science and mental health utterly don't mix until some laws get in place that place the needs of the many above that of the few or something and make these experiments legal.
So is autism caused to some extend by cold parents? Even if people with autism statistically have colder parents? THey might become cold because their child has autism? They might be cold because they are half-autistic themselves?
The single identifiable cause
And what is autism really? It's a set of diagnostics criteria. Why don't you all read along here, does anyone see a problem with this? The terms are so utterly and utterly vague. What constitutes a 'deficit', what constitutes 'abnormality'. Surely I can't be the only one to find it conceivable that the same person might or might not get this diagnosis depending on the shrink in question. I'm one of those people, I was diagnosed with it when I was 9, it was dropped when I was 14, it came back briefly when I was 17 and then itw as dropped agian, and each and every time this coincided with a shrink change. I wouldn't say that some were wrong and some were right. I'm just saying it's almost as subjective as saying if a car qualifies as a "sports car". I mean, we all know a Mini doesn't and a McLaren F1 obviously does. But what about the edge cases? Where do you draw the line.
As far as I know, the reproducibility of psychiatric diagnoses is completely unverified. In fact, there have been many experiments such as the Rosenhan experiment which completely call this reproducibility into question. THere is currently no strong evidence that if you send the same person to two different shrinks they will both give the same diagnosis with high accuracy. And there is weak evidence to the contrary.
Psychiatric diagnoses are continua. It's not a case like cancer or HIV, that you have it or not. It's a blurry line that lacks the so called single, identifiable cause. That the illness is caused by one thing. Autism as a disorder seems to have many different symptoms which intuitively don't have a lot to do with each other. Could it be that those symtpoms are in fact all caused by a complex mechanism of different causes and it's merely a case of comorbility? Who knows? The causes of autism are hardly properly understood. There are like 20 different forms of dwarghgrowth, adult human beings shorter than 1.30 metres in length. And these are all called different illnesses because they have different causes. From genetics to malnurishment to some kind of improper vaccine. Corporal medicine ultimately focuses on the cause. Why? Because eliminating the cause is the msot effective way to cure a disease. There are many diseases that make you caugh a lot, vomit blood. But if you got cancer, aids or a peptic ulcer all require widely different treatments to cure you. cure being the operative word.
In all its duration, psychiatry has yet to produce a single effective cure. THey have produced treatments, but that's something different, a cure is something which actually removes the condition. Once you are cured of cancer, you don't have to undergo chemo any more. AIDS does not currently have a cure, only treatments. Cancer does have a cure. Glasses are a treatment to myopia, not a cure. Eye laser surgery is a cure.
And psychiatric treatment is not actually treating the condition, it treats the symptoms. Many drugs given to psychiatric conditions have the same effect on everyone, if you have the condition or not. People with AD(H)D take Ritalin to focus better, okay, but everyone focusses better from that stuff, it's not a form of medication, it doesn't actually attack some illness, it just makes you focus better, it's a stimulant. Antipsychotics medication make everone calmer and drownzy and not as paranoid, not just people with a psychosis. It's the inverse of a stimulant, it just drowns your mind. Yeah, that's how psychosis is currently treated, the inverse of a mental stimulant. And antipsychotics medication is by and large given to a wide variety of different conditions which have nothing to do with psychoses because the term 'antipsychosis' is a grave misnomer, it doesn't attack a psychosis, it just makes people calmer, more docile and makes them notice less about thier surrounders. You can treat aggression, psychosis, paranoia, you name it with it, it just turns your brain down a notch. And it comes as no surprise that every antipsychotics med has the side effect of making you really sleepy, and Ritalin the inverse, makes it hard for you to go asleep. Also, ritalin is known to possibly induce psychoses and antipsychotics medication make it hard for people to concentrate. That's why John Nash didn't want them.
Also, note that all psychiatric treatment is pharmaceutical, not surgical. No psychiatric treatment is fixed under the operating table. That would actually require people to understand what they are doing. Cancer can be cut out, tumours are cut out, pacemakers are installed. Why? Because people know what they are doing, they know what causes the condition specifically and they quite literally cut the cause out of your body. People don't understand psychiatric conditions enough to be able to mess with someone's brain? Are you kidding me.
The law
One of the most controversial parts of modern day psychiatry is the notion of involuntary commitment. To commit someone to psychiatric wards outside of their will. THe argument is obviously that they are insane and therefore can't make that choice. Okay, I can see that logic, except: Why doesn't the choice then go to their next of kin who are sane? In most first world countries people have the legal right to refuse treatment for life threatening illnesses for reasons ranging from religious to "I just don't want to" to a spiritual medium telling them they just need rest while a doctor told them they have cancer and will die without treatment. And pesonally, I think that's okay. Darwin has a thing to say about it anyway. It's their body, if someone doesn't want to be treated for cancer because they believed a spiritual medium over a doctor. Go ahead, I think you're an idiot but I believe you're old to make your own stupid choices.
Or if you're incapacitated, your next of kin gets to make the choices. If a doctor says "Your daughter has a 60% chance of dying if we don't tranfuse blood now!", the mother can in many countries say "No, we are Jehova's witnesses and she would rather die than accepting a blood transfusion.", so if that's all possible? Why can't someone's parents block an involuntary commitment because someone is a "danger to self". Especially because these medical prognoses are very reliable and a psychiatrist assessing if someone is a "danger to self" is not reliable at all. Itś reliability has never been demonstrated. Please, we have two situations:
- Daughter incapacitated, Doctor saying she has a real chance of dying if she doesn't get a transfusion. Mother blocking this based on a religion which is 70 years old and interpreted the biblic text of not eating blood to ban blood tranfusions which no other denomination of christianity does -> completely allowed.
- Daughter talking albeit psychotically. Doctor saying has a real chance to hurt herself. Daughter expressing her wishes not to be commited. Mother who has known her all her life agreeing based on knowing her own child and feeling that a mental ward would only be worse for her. -> totally not allowed
Can anyone tell me how in the former case the mother can block the life saving treatment for her daughter but in the latter case she can't block the treatment which requires her daughter's freedom to go and stand where she wants to be taken away and isn't life saving?
I strongly urge people to look up the Rosenhan experiment by the way to make up their mind about involuntary commitments. Yes, it was in the 70's, but they said the same thing in thr 70's as they do today. The overal conclusion of the experiment was simple, if you are a completely sane person who has been given a diagnosis by mistake and is commited involuntarily, it is in general impossible to convince a psychiatrist you are actually sane and don't belong there. Any attempt to claim you are sane if you have a diagnosis will just be construed as further signs of insanity. And hey, I would probably get insane if I were locked up in a ward, and many people would. Yeah, I think many people would get a bit violent if they were locked up having commited no crime.
And then there's a slightly more sinister thing going on than mere incompetence. The government, let's face it, political enemies of governments have been termed "insane" throughout history. The constitution in many places guarantees freedom of speech, they can't call you a criminal for your opinions and lock you up. But they can call you insane and lock you up. I urge you to look up "Fred Spijkers", most you will find is in Dutch but google translate should give you the gist. He knew something the Dutch government didn't want people to know about how they basically ignored safety regulations of mines in the military. So they had him declared insane and locked up, they harassed him for 30 years to stop him from breaking his story. thirty years. How can such an operation remain a secret for thirty years? Because again, the Rosenhan experiment. In corporal medicin, you have to bribe so many different doctors. Because if you have a cancer diagnosis a new doctor is going to notice that you don't actually have cancer at the first X ray. But the stickiness of lables means you only have to bribe one psychiatrist. Because all the others will jsut conclude that a perfectly sane man that claism he's been locked up to keep his mouth shut is insane. Even though he's perfectly sane. The Dutch government eventually got found out and had to pay the man millions. This is not some paranoid conspiracy, this is documented fact reported in newspapers. The country was shocked, for a week. He eventually was knighted for his "services" by the very same people who tried to keep him down and reportedly even ordered an assasination attempt.
This is just a case that got to light by pure chance. You'd think governments would do this if they thought they would be found out? For every Fred Spijkers who did eventually, after 30 years get to reveal his story, 20 more people are locked up because they know something that governments don't want people to know.
But this isn't just about governments, this is about psychiatry, how can a completely sane man be considered insane and put in wards for so long? How can trained specialists not be able to see the difference between a sane man who actually knows something and insane man who only thinks he knows something? Apparently modern psychiatry is not advanced enough to see the difference.
The monies
Medicine and capitalism don't mix. Capitalism is a great and simple ideal. Companies are given incentive to produce the best product and offer it for the cheapest price to compete. It's very intuitive and it tends to work. But here's the thing with medicine. the "best" medicine as far as companies go is not the best medicine as far as customers go. The best medicine is a cure, something you take only once. That's not what a company wants, a company wants you to keep taking treatments forever and ever. There is currently no cure for AIDS, you think companies are really interested in finding a cure? Are you shitting me. A cure is something that destroys customers rather than creates them. THe best ice cream means people will keep coming back. The best cure, not so much. You want to keep them alive as long as possible but still keep them dependent on you.
And herein lies the double problem with psychiatry. Psychiatry doesn't cure, and psychiatry does not involve surgery. Surgery typically provides a cure while simply injecting chemicals into one's symstem rarely does. Creating illnesses, telling people they need drugs, there's money to be made. People sarcastically say that psychiatry has failed completely because more people are mentally ill as a result of psychiatry than there used to be because psychiatry rapidly invents new illnesses. Obviously the idea is that those people were always ill, they just didn't know it. But there's more truth to it than you might think. The DSM is heavily sponsored by companies who have an incentive for there to be as many vague conditions which supposedly require expensive drugs as possible. Obviously they exert some amount of influence to invent and create more and more illnesses.
Johnson & Johnson has been involved in a plethora of lawsuits regarding their psychiatric drugs. I know this because I took one of their drugs. An antipsychotics medication. Was I psychotic? No, not really, but like I said, they give it to 14 year old kids because they're a bit restless and paranoid, not something you can't live with. The side effects of these drugs are extensive and structural. What that means is that some of the side effects actually damage your body, stopping to take them won't give you your old capacities back. This drug has been known to cause migraines even after stopping to take them, it destroys your finer motor control. I used to play the piano, I can't do that any more usually. My fingers automatically curl up as if I have some form of parkison, I need to excert conscious will to keep them stretched, it constantly feels like they try to curl up and I need to manually compensate to stress them out which is tiring. One assumes my antagonistic muscles no longer properly function. They have been convicted and settled for in the billions. This is the kind of stuff that profit margins does to medicine. Companies pretty much bribing psychiatrists (lol consultancy fees) to give medication to kids which don't need it and of which they damned well know ultimately eats away at their brain. Antipsychotics medication should be an absolute last resort for people with deep psychoses who cannot see reality from fiction without it. It should not be used for functioning human beings who are slightly restless because it's a poison to nerves and it slowly destroys your nervous system.
The cultural
Chemical imbalance? I believe in it I believe there is probably some genetic factor which causes some level of neurotransmitters which causes things like depression. But I used the word 'level', not 'imbalance', why? Because it's not an imbalance? Anyone paying any attention in secondary school chemistry should know that a chamical balance is of two forms, stable or unstable, a stable balance returns to its equilibrium once removed from it. An unstable one diverges away from it once removed from it. That's what the term 'balance' means in physics and chemistry and any science and always has. It's a state of equilibrium that can either be stable or unstable.
THe chemical in the human body are inharently balanced. You may try to disrupt that by putting some chemical, in it, it might even be for the better. But the moment the chemical goes away the human body attempts to revert to its old equilibrium. That's a stable balance for you.
Obviously, that's not what they mean with "imbalance", people have this connotation that "imbalance" means "bad" and "balance" means "good". Again, science is not moralistic. These terms are purely descriptive, in some cases balance might be good, in some cases it might be bad. Sky scrapers are not balanced actually, which is good, if they were unstably balanced they would fall over when it s windy, if they were stably balanced, like a bo-bo doll. They would wobble a lot. They are quite simply not balanced. They don't sit on a point of equilibrium, they aren't balanced. They're just fixed to the ground. When people say that something is 'imbalanced', they often mean that it's unstably balanced. As in it can fall over at any moment from a slight external force. So thank god skyscrapers aren't balanced. That would be very bad.
So why did psychiatry break tradition with these terms? Well, obviously exactly because it has a "negative connotation", they need a term they can sell. "chemically abnormal levels", which is what they are, doesn't quite sell as much as "chemical imbalance", it's a huge misnomer, but it sells. Or things like 'unstable personality", again, the term unstable implies some form of balance. A chemical mixture is unstable if it is balanced, it is at an equilibrium but it will rapidly diverge from it at the slightest alterations, perhaps even resulting in an explosion, but it is balanced. People with an unstable personality are in fact not "balanced", I don't even see how a personality can be "balanced" or not.
And this brings us back to the start, that mental illnesses are ultimately cultural stigmas. It's not about disabilities at all, some carry them, some don't really. They're heavily political and there's not a lot of hard science involved. And worse, they can be used to lock people up, apparently just because they know something our benevolent leaders think is bad for us to know.
But what do you propose?
And this is the quintessential human condition isn't it? The belief that every problem must have a solution. It goes so fundamentally throughout human nature. The belief, the feeling, the conviction that as soon as there is a problem thay means it can be solved. The truth of the mater is that most problems can't be solved because if they could be solved they were probably already solved. And just doing random things like feeding people drugs they often don't need or locking them often only makes it worse. Do you honestly think it's good for psychotic people to be locked up in a ward rather than to just sit at home with a shrink coming by once a week to talk to them and help them? You think being locked up is a good environment for someone with paranoid psychotic delusions? You just have to accept at one point that you can't really help them, you can only try to make their life as best as possible and not worsen the situation. My cousin is psychotic, fairly deeply, he's clearly paranoid, but he knows he is, and he's also intelligent, he has a job as a programmer, he takes some drugs in a very low dosage which he chose, he didn't want the dosage the psych gave him because he felt it was too much. He's been commuted once and it wasn't good for him, he came out far worse than he went in. Despite all his weirdness, despite that he sometimes calls me in the middle of the night about some super weird paranoid convifctions of which he seems convinced at the moment. I would still consider him far more sane than someone who would deny his or her daughter a blood transfusion on religious superstition.
 
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Apparently this has a one star rating? lol
I found this very interesting, though I disagree that saying someone has a mental illness is always an insult. A mental illness can be defined as "causing distress or disability." If someone thinks you are distressed or disabled, I'm sure they have good intentions if they tell you their concerns.
There are other definitions, some of which can basically be summed up with the word "abnormal," and they are certainly insulting, but I doubt any reasonable psychiatrist would use such a definition.
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TL;DR
I give you huge props and a 5 star rating to take the time to write this and I agree with the first paragraph.
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This really makes me think. Tis a great thought but your blog is a tad bit long. Maybe form a more concise thought or break it up?
As for the topic of insanity I think someone who acts without a justified reason to hurt himself or others is insane.
But what is justified?
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On January 31 2014 07:36 Antylamon wrote:
Apparently this has a one star rating? lol
I found this very interesting, though I disagree that saying someone has a mental illness is always an insult. A mental illness can be defined as "causing distress or disability." If someone thinks you are distressed or disabled, I'm sure they have good intentions if they tell you their concerns.
There are other definitions, some of which can basically be summed up with the word "abnormal," and they are certainly insulting, but I doubt any reasonable psychiatrist would use such a definition. Well, it's a necessary criterion like I said, this means that for something to be considered a mental illness it must be 'insulting', it must be something society frowns upon, but the reverse is not true.
Corporal illnesses aren't always something that is stigmatized, some things are like AIDS, but myopia? Not really. Myopia is a clear disability, but lenses or glasses aren't stigmatized and people aren't afraid to admit they are myopic.
On January 31 2014 07:48 KaiserKieran wrote:
This really makes me think. Tis a great thought but your blog is a tad bit long. Maybe form a more concise thought or break it up?
As for the topic of insanity I think someone who acts without a justified reason to hurt himself or others is insane.
But what is justified?
And that is more or less the problem isn't it? Who is going to decide what is 'justified'. Well, society as a large collective is as it currently stands. If society frowns upon your behaviour it can become a 'mental disorder' even if it harms no one, not even yourself.
Especially "personality disorders" are a wicked case. Some of those are really like "Yeah ehh, you're a bit different but otherwise you bother no one and you have no clear disabilities, but because you're not extraverted or don't like icecream let's call it an illness.'
Especially this. Schizoid personality disorder is the biggest ridiculousness ever. It's basically hermit called disorder.
Or ehh "paraphilia", if you get turned on by stuff a lot of people aren't (or are, they just don't admit it) are turned on by. That's apparently a disorder? Are you kidding me.
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Then there's narcissistic personality disorder. But the funny part is that many very succesful people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and many political leaders display textbook symptoms, they're smart, they know it. And they want to have it their way and they demand excellence and special treatment from those around it and seemingly think they're the centre of the world. Yet, it doesn't impede them from achieving success, one might argue quite the opposite. Being a bit full of yourself in the end helps you get what you want in the world of business and politics.
I wouldn't be so quick to diagnose these guys with NPD. There's nothing wrong with being confident in yourself with regards to something that actually is one of your talents. From what I've read NPD is usually characterized by people vastly overestimating their abilities, not arrogance. But at the same time I think NPD isn't really a true illness because to me it just seems like a coping mechanism to create strong identities for ourselves. Here I think you are confusing strong personalities based on actual achievements with strong personalities based on fantasy.
Cancer does have a cure
Please elaborate. Also, you say that once cured of cancer you don't really have it anymore. However, the way cancer works means that if you have had it once, it is quite likely that it will come back eventually.
If you say that cancer's cure is removing cancer cells from the body, then congrats, you have also confirmed the cure for the HIV.
What constitutes a 'deficit', what constitutes 'abnormality'. Surely I can't be the only one to find it conceivable that the same person might or might not get this diagnosis depending on the shrink in question. I'm one of those people, I was diagnosed with it when I was 9, it was dropped when I was 14, it came back briefly when I was 17 and then itw as dropped agian, and each and every time this coincided with a shrink change.
AD(H)D is confusing to me. On the one hand I know people who clearly do have some sort of problem where it is incredibly obvious if they do not take medication for just one day. I know a kid who will constantly touch people when talking to them (not sexually or anything), toss around tennis balls, start talking about something and then trail off after he gets going because he loses his train of thought... I also know people that, at least to me, don't display any signs of ADHD, yet have diagnoses (many wealthy families/ people who don't like how poorly their children are performing in the US push for academic accomodations through ADD, ADHD, etc. which allow kids special testing conditions, extra time, and prescription drugs.). Executive functioning disorder is kind of the same. In fact according to the criteria for both disorders, like you, I could be diagnosed with either under the right conditions. I could also stretch the truth a little bit and probably get a prescription. I also could probably be diagnosed with asperger's, especially if I had been evaluated three or four years ago.
Hopefully neuroscience becomes an advanced enough discipline that it can displace psychology as a field. Psychology isn't necessarily bad, but it's like looking at the feather types, colors, and beaks of birds and presuming such simple differences to be the field of biology (basically it looks at rather superficial effects and not causes). I actually know nothing about neuroscience though. I agree with most of what you wrote. Society has become so scientific in the past several hundred years that we like to try to think we can fix things, even if it means explaining deviant behavior through vague mechanisms.
Oh god SPD is ridiculous. I can't believe that anybody would even medicate that.
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I read a good deal of what you wrote, and it was really good, but I just wanted to comment on your first paragraph.
I think what your teacher should have responded with was that its your beliefs, and the reasons that you die, that define whether you are insane or not. So for instance if someone has been indoctrinated since he was a child to believe in extremist Islamic propaganda to the point where he believes that when he dies his soul will be transported to another higher plane of existence where he will commune with his God and 72 virgins (or whatever that number was), I think most people would say he has become insane. His mind has been broken down by others, to the point where he accepts this irrational fantasy as reality and will kill himself to reach it and to serve his brethren in their holy war.
But now consider the case of an American soldier. First of all, none of them are going into battle to die specifically; they wear body armour, they drive around in APCs and tanks, and do the best they can to avoid dying. But the reason they serve is "rational" (at least I believe it is); they want to make the world a better place, they feel like they are fulfilling a useful purpose on Earth that no other career can really give them, because very few other careers can directly aid people in another country and protect those in their own as well as in the military (in some cases its the only career).
You can argue that this is a matter of cultural acceptance. But then you get into a relativistic quagmire where the religious extremist has the same value in his beliefs as anyone else. And I think at some point you have to draw the line and decide what 'rational' means. Protecting people you care about, and helping others, even if it risks your life, could easily have more value to a person than living a life of drudgery in an office workplace. This is not insanity in my view. Extreme sports is a borderline case.
But I absolutely agree with you in other cases, such as Schizoid personality disorder. I just think that people do have legitimate reasons for calling others insane; and I think those cases have to be defined from a rational perspective. Otherwise the religious extremist who blows himself up is perfectly sane, he just has a different viewpoint. I can't accept that view; I think the reality is that that person's ability to think rationally has been broken down by religious zealotry; and that no one would willingly choose that if their minds were relatively unaffected. Its vague and confusing for sure, because the 'normal' mind is going to be something that has accepted its surrounding culture. I guess what I believe is that there is a fundamental, rational mode that we need to find and use to judge whether something is insane or not. We just need to figure out how to separate ourselves from our cultural beliefs and respect others who are different but harm no one in their behaviour.
By the way, if Steve Jobs and all the other CEOs actually are more successful because of their narcissistic personality disorder, I don't think anyone is really recognizing them because of that aspect. If people truly were aware of how they behaved, I think no one would have a problem saying that they have a disorder and saying that that's wrong. We would probably swallow it though, because what they do for society does more good than their disorder does bad; you can't say that's true in all cases for people who have that condition. But even then, we would still want to try (or support trying) to get these CEOs some help. At least this is what I feel would happen in society, I might be wrong, in which case I agree with you again that it shouldn't happen.
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Everything is about cultural acceptance. Psychology changes because people want it to change, just like religion. The reasons that these two (religion less so these days in the some countries) are so prevalent despite a lack of hard science is that biologically, humans' ancestors survived by assimilating into a culture, and therefore, humans are "genetically programmed" to survive by assimilating into a culture. Since humans are not inherently different from anything else in the universe (although many believe that humans are), humans are only a sack of chemicals with myriad chemical processes occurring every second that scientists do not understand yet.
Because of this lack of understanding, Human rely on statistics to determine whether two seemingly similar things are different. Humans need to be careful of correlation versus causation; since humans are not telepathic, humans rely on external cues to guess internal processes, but external cues are easily faked. This in conjunction with media/money/other dubious motivations correlations often manifest themselves as causation and humans suffer because of it.
The DSM-IV is full of equivocal and often useless diagnostic criteria because symptoms need not be present as long as other symptoms exist and two persons with completely different symptoms can be diagnosed with the same disease and treatment; this undermines causative relationships completely. Although mutations do exists and hence humans' diverse gene pool, mutations and difference between humans (because humans are very similar and not "unique/everyone is different") cannot account for the variability that the DSM-IV suggests.
Good read. 5 stars. Would read again.
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On January 31 2014 10:54 Chocolate wrote:Show nested quote + Then there's narcissistic personality disorder. But the funny part is that many very succesful people like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and many political leaders display textbook symptoms, they're smart, they know it. And they want to have it their way and they demand excellence and special treatment from those around it and seemingly think they're the centre of the world. Yet, it doesn't impede them from achieving success, one might argue quite the opposite. Being a bit full of yourself in the end helps you get what you want in the world of business and politics. I wouldn't be so quick to diagnose these guys with NPD. There's nothing wrong with being confident in yourself with regards to something that actually is one of your talents. From what I've read NPD is usually characterized by people vastly overestimating their abilities, not arrogance. But at the same time I think NPD isn't really a true illness because to me it just seems like a coping mechanism to create strong identities for ourselves. Here I think you are confusing strong personalities based on actual achievements with strong personalities based on fantasy. They are more than just confident though, if you read the stories about people having to work with these people is that they are completely impossible to work with, demand perfection from everyone around them and are prone to get angry if they aren't treated like a prince wherever they go.
Please elaborate. Also, you say that once cured of cancer you don't really have it anymore. However, the way cancer works means that if you have had it once, it is quite likely that it will come back eventually.
If you say that cancer's cure is removing cancer cells from the body, then congrats, you have also confirmed the cure for the HIV. Obviously the cure for HIV would be to remove the virus from the body, but there isn't a way found yet to do that with HIV, there are ways to do it with cancer.
AD(H)D is confusing to me. On the one hand I know people who clearly do have some sort of problem where it is incredibly obvious if they do not take medication for just one day. I know a kid who will constantly touch people when talking to them (not sexually or anything), toss around tennis balls, start talking about something and then trail off after he gets going because he loses his train of thought... I also know people that, at least to me, don't display any signs of ADHD, yet have diagnoses (many wealthy families/ people who don't like how poorly their children are performing in the US push for academic accomodations through ADD, ADHD, etc. which allow kids special testing conditions, extra time, and prescription drugs.). Executive functioning disorder is kind of the same. In fact according to the criteria for both disorders, like you, I could be diagnosed with either under the right conditions. I could also stretch the truth a little bit and probably get a prescription. I also could probably be diagnosed with asperger's, especially if I had been evaluated three or four years ago.
Pretty much. I would say that these are "fashion diagnoses" to some extent. The last psych I had was the greatest I ever had. She said that what essentially happens is that they have to give you some label to legally help you even though she realizes that whatever label is going to be inadequate because mental illnesses are a continuum but ultimately their hands are tied. They have to give you something to start treatment as far as the law goes.
The issue with psychotherapy is that there are "talkers" and "non talkers", the talkers are easy to help, they are the people who feel relieved by just talking about their problems which is what half of psychotherapy is. The non talkers, such as I, you can't really help them with psychotherapy and I thought it was useless. But she, she was amazing. I would constantly strike discussions with psychiatrists about the inadequacies of the system in place and they typically brushed it away saying that was not why they were here for. She actually debated it with me and at one point said that it could be construed as therapy since it was clearly cathartic to me to debate whatever inadequacies I perceive in things and she was completely right. I wasn't debating to convince her, I was debating because it was cathartic. For more people, just talking about what bothers them helps. For me, I need to talk about it by giving long arse arguments why it sucks for some reason.
Hopefully neuroscience becomes an advanced enough discipline that it can displace psychology as a field. Psychology isn't necessarily bad, but it's like looking at the feather types, colors, and beaks of birds and presuming such simple differences to be the field of biology (basically it looks at rather superficial effects and not causes). I actually know nothing about neuroscience though. I agree with most of what you wrote. Society has become so scientific in the past several hundred years that we like to try to think we can fix things, even if it means explaining deviant behavior through vague mechanisms. The point is that as soon as a mental condition is understood medically a la hard science. It's no longer a psychiatric illness but a neurological illness. If people can actually point out damaged or malformed neurological tissue that causes the condition and find a single identifiable cause then it's no longer the domain of psychiatry but of neuroscience indeed. I mean, you have people with the weirdest neurological disabilities. Like people who can't recognize faces because their neurons have actually been damaged by something. If there was no damaged tissue to explain this it would be a severe form of autism.
Oh god SPD is ridiculous. I can't believe that anybody would even medicate that. There is medication for it?
On January 31 2014 11:20 radscorpion9 wrote:
But now consider the case of an American soldier. First of all, none of them are going into battle to die specifically; they wear body armour, they drive around in APCs and tanks, and do the best they can to avoid dying. But the reason they serve is "rational" (at least I believe it is); they want to make the world a better place, they feel like they are fulfilling a useful purpose on Earth that no other career can really give them, because very few other careers can directly aid people in another country and protect those in their own as well as in the military (in some cases its the only career).
And yet they are rewarded for giving their lives for the cause. Their widows are presented with medals in a pompous ceremony whenever someone elected to die for the cause.
And the terrorists too want to make the world a better place in their own belief of better. That's the point, and they are also fighting for the freedom of their people.
You can argue that this is a matter of cultural acceptance. But then you get into a relativistic quagmire where the religious extremist has the same value in his beliefs as anyone else. The religious extrermist has?
And I think at some point you have to draw the line and decide what 'rational' means. Yes, and whoever decides it will always say "People who have the same moral values that I have."
Protecting people you care about, and helping others, even if it risks your life, could easily have more value to a person than living a life of drudgery in an office workplace. This is not insanity in my view. Extreme sports is a borderline case. And that's exactly what the terrorists do. They give their lives to defend their country and way of live.
Their way of life just involves getting angry if a woman doesn't wear a burqa rather than getting angry because Janet Jackson had a wardrobe malfunction.
But I absolutely agree with you in other cases, such as Schizoid personality disorder. I just think that people do have legitimate reasons for calling others insane; and I think those cases have to be defined from a rational perspective. Otherwise the religious extremist who blows himself up is perfectly sane, he just has a different viewpoint. I can't accept that view; I think the reality is that that person's ability to think rationally has been broken down by religious zealotry; and that no one would willingly choose that if their minds were relatively unaffected. Its vague and confusing for sure, because the 'normal' mind is going to be something that has accepted its surrounding culture. I guess what I believe is that there is a fundamental, rational mode that we need to find and use to judge whether something is insane or not. We just need to figure out how to separate ourselves from our cultural beliefs and respect others who are different but harm no one in their behaviour. So in your opinion there was a time where everyone in Europe was insane in the mediaeval ages?
By the way, if Steve Jobs and all the other CEOs actually are more successful because of their narcissistic personality disorder, I don't think anyone is really recognizing them because of that aspect. If people truly were aware of how they behaved, I think no one would have a problem saying that they have a disorder and saying that that's wrong. We would probably swallow it though, because what they do for society does more good than their disorder does bad; you can't say that's true in all cases for people who have that condition. But even then, we would still want to try (or support trying) to get these CEOs some help. At least this is what I feel would happen in society, I might be wrong, in which case I agree with you again that it shouldn't happen. It's not about people realizing or not they have NPD (if they have it). It's about that NPD apparently is not a disability. Every corporal illness is a disability. It stands in your way to success if you don't get treatment for it be cured by it. But NPD and various other personality disorders or a lot of psychiatric disorders, they aren't disabilities.
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Very, very good blog. Just one thing Id like to point out:
Soft Sciences often do have some reasonable, usually statistical background which makes them more accurate applying them than not applying them.
You may not get results like in physics, but there's usually truth in it that greatly improves your chances of being right compared to going with a "we cant know so we shouldnt act" approach.
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Some of your argument seems to hinge on the fact that Jehova witnesses are allowed to put their children in harm's way because of religion beliefs, but I honestly don't see how it's relevant to your thoughts at all. It's not like people actually agree with Jehova's witnesses allowing their children to die.
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I've also been through the mental health system and have gotten permanently damaged by their "cures". I agree with the majority of what you wrote. It's always infuriated me to hear psychiatrists say, "Mental illness is no different than physical. If you had diabetes, would you refuse insulin?" As you pointed out, there is a vast difference in the level of understanding between diabetes and any mental illness. Why don't they ever take measurements if they are truly treating a "chemical imbalance"? How absurd would it be to diagnose diabetes on self described feelings alone, and not even bother to monitor insulin levels?
I tend to think as you do that the whole "science" is more driven by profit than wellness. As you say, it's far more profitable to perpetually treat symptoms than it is to remove a cause. And what better way to discourage the search for truth than perpetuate the myth that it's already been found? Then update the truth every five or ten years or so to something newer and sexier... more saleable. But it's hard to express thoughts like these aloud without coming across as some conspiracy theorist or science denialist. After all, the opinions of "experts" are worth more, no matter how unsubstantiated, illogical and vague.
Michel Foucault's "History of Madness" and "Birth of the Clinic" are supposed to be pretty good reads on this subject. Never got around to reading them myself...
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On January 31 2014 23:52 Grumbels wrote:
Some of your argument seems to hinge on the fact that Jehova witnesses are allowed to put their children in harm's way because of religion beliefs, but I honestly don't see how it's relevant to your thoughts at all. It's not like people actually agree with Jehova's witnesses allowing their children to die. Fair point, but the point is that it is so in most countries not out of democratic but constitutional reasons out of religious and personal freedoms. The mother is also supposed to interpreted the wishes of the child (not that they always do that). The mother is recognized as the person who knows the child best.
In the event of commitment, the mother is supposed to interpret if the child would want to be committed if of sane mind. In fact, why can't people make a living will for mental illnesses? You can make a formal document observed by a notary in many countries which says what is to be done in conditions when you need medical treatment but you are unconscious. It can say you don't want blood transfusions, not be kept alive when there is no hope of recovery et cetera.
So why can't you make that same document in the event of mental illness when you are still sane? Say that in the event of even deep psychosis you would not want to be committed but rather be left in the care of your family and friends.
Also, here's the thing, in many countries, they can't force you to take medication against your will, so they use the threat of commitment to force you. In my cousin's case, he didn't want the drugs (though he later decided on a low dosage). They threatened to have him committed if he didn't take them because he was clearly insane if he didn't see their benefits. They said he was a danger to others and himself if he didn't take him, I was there when they said it. I instantly objected and argued that I have known my cousin for his entire life and that he was not a danger and that he had never harmed anyone in his ostensibly aggressive tantrums, yes, he was mad and he destroyed things, but the careful observed would note he only destroyed objects of his own possession and never a living thing. He argued that these drugs take time to take effect so why was he immediately no longer a danger if he took them then? Would that not take 2 weeks? His mother was there too and strongly objected. But apparently a psychiatrist who had known him for 4 months was able to overrule us in that and he was committed and was told he could leave at any moment if he took drugs. I argued the absurdity because they had no way of checking if he actually took them. He could tell them he would take them and just not take them. He's an extremely honest person who wouldn't do that but how could they know that?
In the end, I am left to wonder if they didn't care if he actually took them and all they cared about that his ensurance company bought them. They were zealously advocative of the drugs and I'm really left to wonder if they didn't get some 'consultation fees' of some particular company.
On February 01 2014 03:45 Mothra wrote:
I've also been through the mental health system and have gotten permanently damaged by their "cures". I agree with the majority of what you wrote. It's always infuriated me to hear psychiatrists say, "Mental illness is no different than physical. If you had diabetes, would you refuse insulin?" As you pointed out, there is a vast difference in the level of understanding between diabetes and any mental illness. Why don't they ever take measurements if they are truly treating a "chemical imbalance"? How absurd would it be to diagnose diabetes on self described feelings alone, and not even bother to monitor insulin levels? Pretty much, one of the complaints of the Rosenhan experiment was that you could get diagnosed with a variety of conditions quite easily by just acting like you always did except saying that you heard random voices and otherwise did as you always did.
The counter argument was supposedly that if you drank blood and came into the dr's office vomiting blood you would too be diagnosed with a peptic ulcer. I think that's hard to compare, the major differences are:
- You actually vomit blood, you don't just say "Hey doc, I vomit blood some times, even though you don't.
- You take active steps to simulate the symptoms rather than just saying you have the symptoms and nothing more
- They would quickly find out you don't have it if you don't. If once in the hospital you just say a mistake was made and you don't have something and feel nothing at all it would be easy to convince them at the first X ray.
All these things were not true in the Rosenhan experiment.
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useful topic
thank you for passionately caring about something most people don't even ever think of
off topic (sort of):
+ Show Spoiler +i must admit that "stance is always in the way of content" .. when it comes to "judging" content
i am even more cynic than you and possibly as hurt as you (i'm probably twice your age, so comparatively you seem to have more reason to be cuddled, nonetheless...), but
your stance throughout all your op is sad
i was angry around 8 to 25.. and while it was not a choice on my part, it did shape who i have become and how people perceive me
reasoning is good, it is vital, .. freedom and happiness is a concept only achieved through knowledge and debate, never through denial and acceptance of "tradition brainwashing" (mostly from people near you / loved ones)
so .. i guess +5 for blog, but sad that it stems from you being so unhappy with life in general
(not telling you to "lighten up", just mentioning that your view of life is "tainted" by your anger/dissatisfaction.. and while you might have decent analysis/debate/proposal skills .. those might be lost on more people/situations then you realize)
on op: not done so i'll refrain from commenting
again, good discussion to have, thank you
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Canada2568 Posts
From what I've learned from an online psychology course, mental illness is defined as something that is different from the norm. Usually, something that makes them unable to function "normally" in society. Whatever normal means to that society. For example, something that makes them unable to function at work and/or social life as working and being social is generally considered a norm in any society. And sometimes as you said it's a bit more vague.
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On February 03 2014 05:29 Nemesis wrote:
From what I've learned from an online psychology course, mental illness is defined as something that is different from the norm. Usually, something that makes them unable to function "normally" in society. Whatever normal means to that society. For example, something that makes them unable to function at work and/or social life as working and being social is generally considered a norm in any society. And sometimes as you said it's a bit more vague. Yes, that's what they say but the truth of the matter is that it has nothing to do with 'to function' and everything to do with 'Do you function in the way they want you to and do you live your life the way they wanted to.'
When I still talked with psychologists and psychiatrists I was constantly trying to steer the conversation towards help with actual problems that I have. I have no sense of the passage of time, I have no sense of left and right. Those are actual disabilities I wanted help with. They constantly tried to steer towards spending more time with fellow students, going out. All they were interested in is why I didn't go with the other students to some stupid summer camp.
It's not about "helping" people to function at all, it's about creating a society of idealized, blonde, labrador owning, extroverted people with 2 children who go to church each Sunday.
Who is going to judge what "functioning" means? Ultimately people will always substitute "functioning" with "behave as I like to live my life myself", and there is also the inherent cultural bias that most psychologists and psychiatrists, being academic, are politically liberal. Which I also am, but it does mean that they will automatically perceive several conservative political opinions which are quite common like say homophobia as "not functioning properly".
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In an ideal world, functioning would imply being genetically similar (not sure the correct word for this; I'm talking about down syndrome mutation as genetically dissimilar). "Psychological disease/whatever" should have some unequivocal physical evidence.
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On February 03 2014 17:26 Release wrote:
In an ideal world, functioning would imply being genetically similar (not sure the correct word for this; I'm talking about down syndrome mutation as genetically dissimilar). "Psychological disease/whatever" should have some unequivocal physical evidence. And that's the point isn't it, if a genetic cause it found it's no longer the domain of psychology and psychiatry but simply that of neuroscience. There in fact _are_ mental diseases with a clear genetic cause and these are often clear disabilities. The entire reason why mental illnesses are so utterly complicated is because the sheer use of the word 'illness' is a gross misnomer, they are simply personality types, and not even type is an accurate word ever to describe a continuum like this.
Autism in particular is interesting, some people have argued that if the entire world were high functioning autistic then human productivity would far surpass that which it is today, and there is certainly merit to this argument. The only reason it is an illness is because they are "different". If the entire world were autistic shit would get done far more effectively. People wouldn't waste time on petty useless social conventions and everyone would be insanely specialized which ultimately serves the collective better.
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EPT
